 There we go. So thank you for the introduction, Jan. I'm excited to give you an overview of the Energy Commission's work with microgrid, which has been going on for more than a decade. What I'd like to do is actually first start with an overview of our R&D program. So I'll break the presentation up into three separate subjects. So I'll quickly go over our EPIC program, spend a fair amount of time on our microgrid research, and then lastly, I'll talk a little bit about our energy storage research, since that relates very closely to our microgrid research and is a separate track in terms of our research, but as I mentioned, closely connected to our microgrid research. As was noted, if you have questions, please raise your hand. And I'm having a little bit of a difficulty. Hold on a second. Okay, and what I'll do is I was pulling up the participant list because if you have a question during my slides, as was mentioned, please raise your hand and I will discuss those any clarification questions on the slide. And if we're going to the longer Q&A, then we'll use the Q&A function. So just to make that process clear. Okay, so let me first of all talk about the EPIC program. EPIC program was established by the PUC at the request of the legislature to provide for R&D funding for the state of California to address California's energy goals. We think of those goals currently as kind of three broad topics. We have decarbonization to meet our greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, affordability and equity to meet the needs of reducing the cost electricity for all ratepayers, but particularly for those in low-income and disadvantaged communities, we have a focus on that because they have a higher burden associated with their electricity. And then lastly for resiliency, and microgrids fit in a couple of those areas, but we think of them mostly in the resiliency areas since they have been providing and the resiliency for their customers, but also that tends to be a strong driver for someone pursuing a microgrid. The EPIC program, as I mentioned, it's a large program. It's actually managed by the PUC, but there are four administrators of this program, the California Energy Commission, and each of the three investor-owned utilities. So Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric, those are the four administrators. We each get a portion of funding from the EPIC program, and it's about an 80-20 split. So Energy Commission has about 80 percent, and the utilities have about 20 percent. So they have projects that they fund through the EPIC program, and we have projects that we fund through the EPIC program. The EPIC program isn't going on since the early, so 2013, we're closely approaching our 10-year anniversary. The EPIC program for the Energy Commission has had, as you see here, 328 projects and awarded $718 million. And so it's a fairly substantial program that's been going on for that time. We focus on a variety of different topics. The project categories you see down below, we have our entrepreneurial ecosystem. So we have a, the entire program is working to build the capabilities within the state, not only just to provide the technologies to the ratepayers, but also to try to support small startup companies and get them moving through into the commercialization for their technology and bring that into the public sector for the ratepayers to be able to utilize those technologies. Resilience and safety, as I mentioned before, and grid decarbonization as well as building decarbonization. Transportation is another major one that we are focusing on because it's a very important part with California's goal for electric vehicles in the personal vehicles, but also moving into medium and heavy duty vehicles, particularly drivers for school buses and transit agencies. We see the larger transportation, the heavier vehicles being greater importance, but also greater impact on the grid. And lastly, we have our industrial and agriculture program, which focuses on a very important part of California's economy. We have three different ways that we fund our research. We have applied research, technology demonstrations, and market facilitation. So let me describe those a little bit so people have enough perspective of how they align. So applied research, we think of as technologies that may have had a laboratory demonstration, but they want to expand that laboratory and bring it into a pilot situation, either a pilot within the laboratory or a pilot in a real-world demonstration, real-world environment. Then there's technology demonstrations, which are taking basically pre-commercial technologies demonstrating in a real-world environment with real-world end users and applications. And then market facilitation covers kind of the broad prospect of those technologies, trying to scale them up and bring them into market, whether it is helping to provide advice to small startups about how they can get investment, making introduction with investors to helping them with business plans, helping them with manufacturing, so they can improve and scale up their manufacturing available, meet a growing need from the market and be able to support the market. So those are the three basic buckets that we have for funding, and you can see that it follows across the entire lifecycle of technologies. Now, I will differentiate that early stage R&D, we are not in the really, really early stage. So there is, if you haven't heard of it, Department of Energy has their RPE program, which is taking something from a conceptual level and bringing it into a laboratory environment and hopefully scaling up from there. So their funding would proceed our funding. And in fact, we have a close collaboration with them in order to understand their technologies and how those are progressing and whether there might be an opportunity to phase those into our applied research to continue to bring them to a pilot demonstration. And also we have through some of our solicitations the opportunity for companies that were funded by RPE to then be more easily brought into a solicitation and funded for next scale up. So we have a really close collaboration with them to help in that pipeline of bringing early, early stage technologies, hopefully to the pilot demo and then the adoption phase. One thing that we do work on is, as I mentioned, trying to build the ecosystem within the market. And one of the most recent tools that we developed is the Empower Innovation Tool. What we have found is there's some challenges with getting entities to be able to know what their interests are and able to pair up in general. But for us, it is most important for those connections to be made so that people can bring teams together to provide the best kind of research project possible. So you have a small startup company, they may want to demonstrate their technology in a real world situation. How do they find those real world demonstration sites? How do they find a community, a home, a business to be able to test their technology? So this Empower Innovation Tool is open to anyone to sign up for and participate in. But the intent is to try to help bring people together so that they can help to identify ways that they can work together. So one particular area that's important for us is doing demonstrations in low income and disadvantaged communities and the challenge there is how do you identify a low income or disadvantaged community that might want to be a representative location for a demonstration. And that challenge is we hope will be alleviated by having this tool. And in fact, we already have a number of communities that have signed up here. They articulate what their interests are. It might be a mobile home park community that's interested in solar or adding solar and storage. It might be another community that's looking for micro grid. But it's a way for them to announce themselves and then hopefully pair up with technology developers so that they can help put a team together to support our solicitations. One thing I should make you aware of is all of our awards are competitive grants. So we put out a solicitation. People respond to the solicitation and then we review and score those proposals and then award within the funding allocation that we have set aside for that individual solicitation. And so entities can't just come to us and say, hey, I've got a great idea. I would really like to have you fund me. We can't operate that way. We are required to be a competitive grant program. And so what we do is our team of folks work to identify what are the critical needs, research needs, put out a solicitation to address those, and then get folks to propose. We're very successful at this. We actually have a pretty high response rate, which is very exciting for us in the sense that there's a lot of interest in the program. And that's great. Sometimes it's disappointing to us because we don't have as much money to fund everybody that we would like to. But we're able to really, I think with the size of the program, we're able to award quite a few substantive grants. And as you'll see, we've been able to do quite a bit of that in the microgrid world. So that kind of wraps up my overview of the R&D program. Hopefully that gives you some perspective of our program. And I'll see if there's anyone who has raised their hand. It doesn't appear there are any questions at this point. So I will proceed on to discussing microgrids. So one thing I should focus on is within the EPIC program, we focus on clean energy microgrids. So there are lots of microgrids that are out there. Those microgrids generally are focused on diesel backup support to facilities. And that's pretty ubiquitous in the country. However, clean energy microgrids, not as much. There are many reasons for that. Primary reasons are challenges in designing these and the ability for an entity to know how to pull them together. And it takes special expertise to be able to pull these together. So we don't see a lot of deployment. Most of the privately funded ones are few privately funded ones and some they're being looked at for by the utilities. But I think most of the ones that we've identified in the state were actually funded by the Energy Commission. We are finding they have our showing success. So the initial Toronto microgrids that we have completed have demonstrated some great success. And I'll go through some examples of that in a few minutes. And so they have shown that they can already provide resilience and cost reduction. But we need to continue to demonstrate that they are commercially viable. In other words, the payback is going to be worth that initial upfront cost to make them more widely available. The legislature passed SB 1339 over a year and a half ago. That legislation requires the public utility commission to help support the commercialization process of microgrids by developing some tariffs and addressing some interconnection issues which you'll hear as I go through have been some challenges in the past to making these microgrids happen more rapidly. So that proceeding is ongoing. We're expecting, I think the PUC is expecting a early decision to come out within the next month or so. And I think they'll be doing it in multiple stages to be able to address this. Some of the challenges are certainly more complex than they can handle quickly, but they're making progress. And in fact, looking at how they can deploy microgrids more rapidly, very quickly, hopefully to start getting them in line for fire season. So we can have rapid deployment of resiliency. But as I mentioned, there are challenges that still remain. So there's high upfront costs and a lot of entity, a lot of building owners or communities can't afford the upfront cost to be able to put these in place. One of the solutions to that that we're finding is as you become more easily designed, you're getting providers to work to develop power purchase agreements. So PPA, so there's no upfront cost to the building owner of the community that can be wrapped into the overall cost and paid out through their energy costs over the course of 10 to 20 years. And that makes it more palatable, particularly for municipalities that may not have that upfront money available upfront to put it together. They're still individually designed, although we're moving towards a plug and play, we're not there yet. And so the challenge is getting to that point. And we're looking at, are there R&D efforts, maybe solicitation that we can work on to help improve the plug and play capability, although there are a few vendors that are moving in that direction. Controllers are still a challenge. There's a variety of controllers available with different levels of capability. And really selecting your controller is a challenge. And you have to be pretty adept at the controller technologies in order to know which ones to choose. And so that can be a difficulty. And hopefully as we move more towards the plug and play, that will become more transparent. One of the challenges I think that exists here is there so far tends to be integrators that pull these together. And that's great. And they're starting to look at how they can create some very simple ones and how they can create more elaborate ones. And the market is trying to grapple with that so that they can provide services that meet their customer needs. And then right now, because of the designs of interconnections, it can be challenging to do more than just get value for the individual customer. So broader grid services is still quite a bit of a challenge. So I noticed that we did have a Q&A question. So we did get a question about, are there additional challenges with land control, prices owning, and approvals? Very good point. So yes, there are. So permitting can be a very difficult hurdle to get through. It usually happens faster than interconnection, but it is a problem. In part because things like citing energy storage is still something that most authorities having jurisdiction, HJs, do not have a whole lot of experience with. And so they approach it very tentatively. They're concerned about the safety of energy storage. Everyone has heard the stories about lithium ion batteries burning up. And there's concerns about that. So the HJs tend to look very closely at these and make sure they're very comfortable with the deployment of energy storage. One thing that we currently have going on is we have just announced an award to help develop guidance for HJs and for the community about how to review energy storage, all different types and sizes for behind the meter applications to help create a little bit more standardization in that market or excuse me, in that process so that it's easier, A, for the permitting agencies to understand what they need to look at and how they need to look at it. And then also for the energy storage market, it's very important for them to have some sense of consistency that if they're selling into the Bay Area market or the LA market or the Central Valley market that there's going to be some consistency in how these things are considered and the permitting process will be a lot easier. So let's answer that question. We do see some challenges in that area and we're working to try to create solutions to fix that. So let me talk through some of the history of our Epic program micro research. So this goes back more than a decade and it's important to understand that when the Energy Commission, I wasn't with the Energy Commission of time, we started this thanks to Mike Bravely who helped create this program many years ago, to at that time it was really the question was how do you get these distributed energy resources into a system and control them. And at that time it was manual switching and controllers were not really sophisticated enough to do that and so it was a matter of how do you make this work. So that was the very early stage. Once those controllers got to be more capable, then it was a question of okay, so what how can we start showing the value of these micro grids. So in the 2015 to 2019 timeframe that was a solicitation that we put out that was for seven micro grids that were focused on five of them were focused on true resiliency value and two were focused on just large amounts of distributed energy resources and how you integrate those together. Those seven projects just ended last year and so we're still going through all the lessons learned. I'll go through some of that today but they provided a rich environment of data gathering to help us understand those values and then on the heels of that we recognize that some of the some of the recipients from that solicitation were starting to make inroads and being able to demonstrate that they could possibly commercialize their solutions. And so the next question became how do we demonstrate the commercialization pathway better. And so we know technically we can do it. We know the prices of solar and storage are going down. How do we develop replicable pathways and so we came out with a solicitation in 2018. Those will run through till 2023 where the purpose of those micro grid projects is simply to build the micro grid out and and create a business model such that those those micro grids can be replicable throughout the state in a variety of applications and we do have a variety of applications that will be demonstrated there. So there were nine awards as part of that solicitation. One other thing I want to point out is that so we've had this as you see on this era we've had kind of this focused attention to micro grids over the years but we're also finding that as proposals come in for other projects whether they be industrial efficiency whether they just be solar applications for a variety of different purposes that may not be focused on micro grids but maybe focused as I said on efficiency or solar implementation or storage that customers are starting to want to have that micro grid capability. So in addition to the the seven in the 2015 to 2019 time frame and an additional nine in the 2018 to 2019 time frame we have a very robust portfolio of micro grids that are currently in development that we'll be learning about from a variety of different perspectives and so we're very excited to have have that happen. So there is another question that came up what's the biggest challenge that you see when selecting controllers integration proprietary protocols? So the biggest challenge I think right now is it's not something that mostly anyone that a typical say a typical energy manager would be able to go out and do very easily. I think the controllers are getting more sophisticated and under in a energy manager knowing how to select that controller for the functionality that they want not over buying or under buying I think is a challenge. I think there's a difficulty with being able to select those and knowing what to select. Now I will say that the developers are getting their products much more clearly defined. They are expanding the services that they provide so you're also getting more options and that may also be difficult because you may not want all the options that they provide. You may want a very simple one and they may provide more but they're you know they're looking to provide a wealth of services but I see it as a little bit like buying a car. Sometimes you can't pick and choose the options that you want. It comes packaged with things that you may never use and really making that selection I think can be difficult. Also I don't think we've really come through the a clear path for cybersecurity that is improving and entities are looking at you know the the manufacturers are looking at certainly making their systems more cybersecurity but I don't think it's really clear yet how to make that choice and how to ensure that your system has cybersecurity. So I think those are all still challenges with with the with the control of the of the or selecting your controller. So as I mentioned we have quite a few projects we have 35 different micrograys going on around the state. We have a hundred million that in epic funds that we've invested and typically when we put out a solicitation we require match funding which means the recipient also has to put money into this we want them to have skin on the game in the project and so you can see 80 million dollars in match funding so it's and it's actually that's probably brought down by the earlier years where we funded more but now it's pretty much 50 50 all of them are looking at increasing resiliency that's a huge driver right now we're looking at maturing the micro control technologies we're trying to gather as much of the best practices out of these as possible and make those available more broadly and so it's an ongoing process of collecting information and sharing it and hopefully through this process we're helping to drive down the costs and establish some deployment norms so another question that came in is what are the best resources to start learning about the best controller technologies option on the market I have to say we don't have that yet I've not seen any any specific source it's a matter of going to the individual manufacturers and and and evaluating them no one's done kind of their consumer reports of the different options you have to look at each individual option and try to figure out what whether it has the solutions that you want and the services that you want and so there's a variety of options on the table there's Siemens and Schneider the the main entities SEL Schweitzer Electric makes portions of it that they're building into micro grid controls there are entities that have been recipients of our projects that have created their own control software and systems like gridscape and charge lists so it's really it's you have to go out there and do a lot of research there's not a particular location where you can find all the information on them and the services that they provide but hopefully through our research we can start assembling that information and we're looking to try to do that through the through learnings from our projects so we have a range of applications we have through our solicitations and the the formation of our solicitations what we ask for we've gotten some diversity but we just find that recipients are giving us a lot of diversity as well so we have many critical facilities that's typically driven by the need for resiliency we have two ports that have been recent recipients port of San Diego and the port of Long Beach which are doing some interesting projects the military has some very interesting projects and for those that would think well maybe that's just applies to the military it turns out that they're looking at applications that can be transferable to other customers so you know a bad image at the very bottom but data centers are huge opportunities and and have substantial issues particularly with you know they can't they have no tolerance for a breaking energy so they've got to have constant and so even switching over from grid mode to island mode can be a challenge and so a project we have going on at Port Winnie we'll look at applications for a data center the camp parks is looking at nested micro grids so they'll have a micro grid for the entire base and then they'll be broken up into some smaller micro grids and what are the lessons learned for that the other picture is for Miramar which is looking at using landfill gas and helping to levelize the landfill gas so even though they're military and you think that's a that's a very focused application it turns out that they're looking at some of the very challenges that we'll see elsewhere in the state we have a number of communities and then some in industrial sections as well so we're looking to grow and expand these we also have a diverse set of designs in our portfolio that we're learning from so we have in terms of owners we have and use owners third party owners like I said the pts and utility owners and that one utility owner I'll talk about a little bit as barrigo springs and that's send you a gas and electric that's our only utility one that we have funded within energy commission funding but we have a number of end user and third party ac coupled and dc coupled operations a variety of sizes so I'll talk about some of the variety of sizes here from the very small like fire stations to the very large like an entire community and the experiences that we're gathering from everything from from the small to the large as well as a variety of obviously a generation storage sizes so from the very low which I mentioned here actually the 37 comes from one of the fire stations to the very large storage right now or the large start portfolio which is actually associated with a an air a community airport microgrid up in Humboldt county some of our lessons learned I've gone through some of these so far but I'll I'll touch on some other ones biggest part of the pre-design I think is as I mentioned before that having the expertise it's it generally is taking some very focused expertise to be able to try to pull these microgrids together select the technologies and integrate them we need to get more to a plug and play manner and so we're working to try to do that but that was you know each of the microgrids we've had right now have been of the type that as people often say you've seen one microgrid you've seen one microgrid because each one was designed slightly differently had different operations we want to move that to a more consistent approach in the design build as I mentioned interconnection permitting as well but interconnection can take the longest sometimes from six months to a year for the interconnection to happen depending upon the complexity of the microgrid and its application and where it's located the challenge the biggest challenge with that is for the developer or the owner you go into the developing a microgrid at a point where you may not know how long that process is going to take and that you know time is money and so that's very difficult for developers to know that I know and that's in part why the cpc is working through this try to figure out how to streamline that process to make it easier make it more consistent so that it gives some additional confidence to developers and owners that they get into this process that it'll go more smoothly as well as information available to communities so communities will know where the greatest congestion and issue is in their community and and know where the where it could be easier more difficult to to focus on the or where the interconnection might be a problem and the operations and maintenance so like with the pre-design operations and maintenance takes special expertise if you're a building energy manager you may be able to pick that up and be able to run it very well and there are examples in our portfolio where they've done that some of them have contracted out that onm and so uh use something that a that a owner operator has to think about going into it is how are you going to keep this thing operational over time a contract for ongoing maintenance or you plan to do it yourself so some thinking that has to go into that that um may not be the case and of with individual applications so let me go through some examples and i'm going through these two quickly of some of our uh our successes so this one uh Blue Lake Rancheria has received the most press and the most interest around the country it's been a very successful uh micro grid so this was designed by the Shots Energy Center at Humboldt State University for the Blue Lake Rancheria uh which is actually um a casino but that casino is also an American Red Cross Shelter provides needed services to the community in the event of a grid outage uh this micro grid um supports um that that rancheria and um it actually has uh done a couple of things that were pretty interesting during the course of the of the micro grid development after it got operational but before the end of the agreement there was a fire nearby grid went out this thing islanded seamlessly and in fact the rancheria did not even know that the power had gone out until they got a notice from PGN and the power had gone out so it was successful in the sense of transferring over from grid tide to independent um operation very seamlessly which is great but most importantly during uh uh public safety power shut off last fall it demonstrated multiple capabilities so it provided uh energy for uh 10,000 community members to be able to come to the uh Red Cross Center and be able to utilize the energy there and be able to you know take care of basic functions they are able to set rooms aside in the hotel for people with medical conditions that required electric equipment to keep them alive the community um themselves determined that it saved four lives as a result of the operation of that micro grid they were able to operate their gas station which was the only operational gas station in the community to help people have fuel for their vehicles which is a great service and they provided simple things like charging capabilities for phones but also ice for the community so that micro grid operated really excellently it's an award-winning micro grid multiple awards and in addition to all that resilience they're also showing that they're getting 58 reduction energy costs over the course of each year so the success of it has been so great that the rancheria has decided to expand it they're going to double the capacity of the micro grid and so it's really one of our greatest successes from the from the research and Humboldt State as you see has gone on to win another award to do another really interesting project um and realizing that it's about quarter after so I'm going to go through the next examples more quickly uh micro grids for fire stations grid scape developed this system they actually did it for three fire stations those fire stations have been get have had have been able to island for up to 10 to 12 hours they have the fire chief has considered the value of these micro grids important because they have to rely on a diesel backup in an emergency when they run out of diesel they're back on the market competing with everybody else for diesel at that time and so it can be very difficult for them to replenish their diesel and anything that allows them to to extend their diesel source is really an important aspect for them so that is a another great success from our perspective. Borrego Springs is our utility micro grid this one was developed by San Diego Gaston Electric through multiple um through multiple awards from Department of Energy and Energy Commission this island is an entire community of Borrego Springs and they have exercised it for multiple um applications in the case of storms that have cut out power or when they needed to do work on the transmission line so this community is at the end of a transmission line if that one transmission line goes out they're out of power so part of developing this was to help bring that capability to the community. The two new ones that are in development as I mentioned Humboldt State is developing this one at the Redwood Coast this one will support not just the airport but other customers behind the same point of common coupling and as a part of that it's going to be co-owned by PG&E everything in front of the meter and the Redwood Coast Energy Authority the CCA everything behind the meter and they're working on creating experimental tariffs on how they can share electricity between the two and how they deal with that. Then we have the Lancaster Advanced Energy Community this one's actually going to create a virtual power plant for the city of Lancaster that will include multiple micro grids multiple types of energy storage and bringing all together to create a green district in a full virtual power plant so this one is just in the early design phases but a very innovative approach was part of our advanced energy community solicitation not part of our micro grid solicitation but again incorporates multiple elements and we look forward to that when moving forward. And then I'll just briefly go on to since we're getting low on time our energy storage we have a separate effort California is already a big user of energy storage and it's growing we look at trying to do three different things with our research strategy diversifying our focus there is on identifying helping develop non-lithium ion based energy storage devices those being things like flywheels flow batteries alternative chemistries to demonstrate those energy storage technologies in a variety of applications and then helping to de-risk in this case lowering the manufacturing costs of those technologies so that we can they can be more competitive with lithium ion. So I have a few questions that have come up as I've tried to run through the the rest of the slides here and give more time for questions so I'll start with I think what is the oldest question which is what's the business case for these microgrids examples you have used are they viable without subsidies if not what percent of the costs were covered by subsidies so that's a really good question so from our first seven that we came across that we that we invested in those required subsidies to be able to make them viable the next set the current set the nine that we currently have are intended to demonstrate that you can make a microgrid cost competitive without subsidies now there's research elements that come as part of that which is why we have funding that we've supported those projects but the intent is for those projects to be able to demonstrate that without any subsidies at all they can be cost competitive that's one thing if you look at someone like Gridscape that's developing this model based on the Fremont fire stations they actually have created a business model of their selling around the state and there's multiple communities that they're selling this to using a PPA approach to be able to bring microgrids to more fire stations 911 call centers emergency centers etc so there is a path for these without subsidies and they are also when this developed a package system so they're early in that phase I would not say that it's you know really widely deployed in the state but we're moving in that direction so feel very positive about that the next questions are delaying cost risk associated with the interconnection correlated with the size of the microgrid I would say generally the answer to that is yes however it also relates to where it is on the grid and it could be a small one it could be the individual reviewing it at the utility being more particular or more specific about what has to happen we've seen a lot of different situations where even in the Fremont fire stations where two of them got through the process and the third one took longer no good reason for it in reality the utilities are getting more and more interconnection requests and they're building their capabilities and expanding their capabilities so I think there's some growth issues at the utilities and they've done a lot to try to improve that streamline their processes but we still have a long way to go in making that process much easier next question what are the biggest technical challenges for the really grand tree a microgrid to support at the time knowing that they need to do it pretty quickly I'm not quite sure I understand that question if you could clarify that question that would be great and I'll come right back to it next question is what value are entities attributing to resilience when assessing the business case economics so we have requested them to look at obviously upfront costs and the generally the value of the energy saving we do not have a good way at this point to cover things like resilience and quantifying resilience it will be up to the individual recipients to try to figure out the way to do that in some cases it can be relatively easy if you have an industrial facility or you have any other kind of commercial facility where downtime results in you know it is definitely equated to cost it'll be easy to do that it'll be much more difficult to do in things like community centers or others and so we are still trying to come through that there's a project that the governor's office put forward to try to look at the cost of resiliency I think it's going to take a while for that research effort to come to fruition but it's definitely something that we struggle with and you know anyone who has great ideas please pass them along because we always look forward to ways to help capture the resilience right now it's it's there's not a great path out there for questions can you talk more about how the PPA approach works sure so the PPA approach works by say the developer drawing upon investor money which is then used to pay for the equipment and the development of the microgrid without the cost of the being borne by the the owner of the facility then what happens is that developer takes over the energy costs from the utility and they take a certain and so they are guaranteeing a certain amount of cost savings for the building owner over time or for the customer over time but they're also taking some amount of that savings the overall savings and helping to pay back the investor for the money that they put in in the front so the investor is putting money in and getting some payback over time and the facility owner is getting reduced energy costs maybe not as much as if they paid for it themselves or definitely not as much as if they pay for it themselves but certainly some cost savings that they can realize plus the value of the resilience next question if epic supports new non lithium ion technologies wouldn't this result in increasing the time and difficulty of securing permits as the utilities need to learn the new technologies to provide the permits so yes i think that can happen and no it may not i think it will depend upon the technology and depend upon the utility's evaluation of it so for example if you look at this picture that we have up on the screen of the eos Aurora this technology is a very stable non toxic environment it's an environment for the easy to recycle no chance of burning the safety features associated with that are much better than lithium ion and so i think would be relatively easy to make the case that that one is relatively is much easier to permit than maybe a lithium ion technology so yes there'll be a learning curve but we think the value of having a diversified portfolio is important the other reason it's important is because right now lithium ion has a number of challenges i mentioned the the fires but there's also acquisition of the of the materials needed to make lithium ion not just the lithium but the cobalt that lead to equity issues in other countries also lead to supply issues there are also competition between the transportation sector and the the the mobile and the stationary so right now there's a lot of lithium ion going into the mobile sector and there'll be competition for it on the on the stationary sector and that can be a problem as well okay so i think if you bring up all the questions let's move on so that that takes me that was the end of my presentation so i didn't see any hands raised i think i've gone through the whole q and a any other questions uh we do have one uh guest aj raise the hand let me unmute him or her so aj now you are allowed to talk aj can you hear me okay apparently i think he mutated himself or herself or he doesn't have a microphone okay let's move on and see do we have any other questions from attendees so now you have two way you can do that one is keep typing your questions on the q and a or you can raise your hand and i'm going to unmute you so you can ask your question alive Dave i do have one question so i think a lot of people ask about the controller question and there's a very active community and a working group at IEEE working on the 2030.7 and the 2030.8 which is specifically for the functionality for the controller and also the testing for the controller so how any commission and this project can contribute to the society working in the controller functionality designs yeah so so that's actually a really good question and is one that we is on our on our near-term list to focus on is more on the controller technologies and the capabilities and the designs and trying to make move more towards the plug and play so we anticipate that we'll be having some future solicitations that will help to hopefully move the needle on those controller technologies and bring them into a more rapid deployment option case so basically making it easier for end users to be able to select and and implement them particularly in you know some of the simpler cases like you know smaller resilience facilities thank you very much so I think we are uh in the end of the one hour seminar and again thank you very much Dave for this excellent knowledge sharing and the presentation with Stanford students and the community and last let me do a very quick housekeeping here so thank you Dave to give the first smart grid webinar in this quarter in the spring quarter and under this global pandemic of the COVID-19 and we're going to have another three excellent topic and speakers in the next several weeks and on the area of great resilience and security so stay tuned and for the students please if you haven't you know please register for this seminar which will go into offer one unit credit thank you all for your time and see you again thank you for the opportunity to speak I appreciate the opportunity thank you Dave